Archives of Sorrow: An Exploration of Australia's Stolen Generations and their Journey into the Past

We primarily see the archive as a storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is a site of memory and a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. It is also a space of confrontation, where expectations are denounced as lies, and where the truth assumes a different colour. This article examines the role of the archive in the lives of Australia's Stolen Generations Aboriginal Australians who were removed from their families and institutionalized from 1910 until the mid-1970s), and argues that returning to the archive is both an attempt to confront and negotiate past traumas and one's relationship to unknown worlds. Through the use of an ethnographic case study, I will detail the important links between returning to the archive and ideas of healing, and moving forward.